Project 2025 has landed in the Oval Office.
The 922-page policy manifesto described as a "playbook of actions" for a new conservative administration crafted by more than 140 veterans of Donald Trump's White House, many of whom returned this week, is aligned with many of Trump’s more than 30 first-week executive orders, despite his campaign trail condemnations.
The proposal, which calls for hundreds of federal policy reversals and sweeping power consolidations, became a flashpoint in the 2024 election, forcing the president to distance himself from numerous allies he'd later invite back into the fold.
Trump said in a debate that he was “not going to read” the Heritage Foundation-crafted document and routinely distanced himself from the policy directives during the campaign. But his first-day staffing and policy moves read like a near-direct implementation of the policy.
Trump has already tapped Project 2025 authors and contributors Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Brendan Carr to chair the FCC, the agency he authored a chapter of plans for inside Project 2025, and Tom Homan as ‘border czar,’ along with numerous other Heritage Foundation alumni.
Many of Project 2025’s answers for border security mirror Trump’s first-day orders on immigration, too. While the document called for the “use of active-duty military personnel…to assist in arrest operations along the border,” Trump’s day-one executive order directs “the Armed Forces… [to] prioritize the protection of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the United States along our national borders.”
Project 2025 also championed an order overturning a civil rights initiative from President Lyndon B. Johnson that prevented federal contractors from engaging in racial discrimination as a counter against “the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” On page 584, the mandate advises that “the president should… rescind EO 11246 [Johnson’s Equal Employment Opportunity order].”
Trump’s Tuesday order uses much of the same language as the Project 2025 passage recommending the repeal, including similar diatribes against corporate DEI initiatives.
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The president’s repeal of a Biden-era sex discrimination protection order takes similar guidance from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. In a section penned by Vought, the playbook calls for immediately revoking Biden’s Executive Order 14020.
A Trump order ending the policy “would eliminate central promotion of abortion; comprehensive sexuality education; and the new woke gender ideology,” Vought wrote. Trump’s inauguration-day order fulfills these policy recommendations with largely similar language, claiming “gender ideology replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.”
Other sweeping federal policy changes included in the mandate and signed by the president on his first day include a broad mandate to extract oil and gas from swaths of Alaska with less regulation, and an end to the Biden-era promotion of electric vehicles. Trump also left the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization, two pleas from the far-right manifesto.
Not every executive order came straight from Project 2025. One, which gives Trump a broad license to fire career civil servants and replace them with partisan appointees at many levels of the federal bureaucracy, was included in the mandate but was initially the policy of the first Trump administration.
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